User:Jonathan Groß/Roscher
This is my sandbox for building a database based on Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher's Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (6 vol.s, 1884–1937).
Authors
In December 2023 I created FactGrid items for all 130 authors of Roscher's Lexikon, each with sitelinks to Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata (where available), labels and descriptions, given name(s) and surname, date and place of birth and death, GND and VIAF IDs. Some also have additional statements like place of address, education institution, memberships and so on.
In January and February 2024 I added 13 additional authors who contributed corrections and additions to the Lexicon which were published on the covers of the fascicles.
Query for all Roscher authors: https://tinyurl.com/ynlvx5po
Ontology
A fully developed ontology for Greek mythology does not exist yet. For the classification of Roscher's article subjects I opted for basic terms that are specific and familiar enough to be useful. The articles in Roscher's Lexicon are aimed at named entities with a strong bias for personal names (or names that may be traced back to such a name). The large majority of articles in Roscher's Lexicon describe to mythical persons (deities, deified heros, mortal humans, hybrids like centaurs and satyrs) or their epithets (epicleseis, patronyms). To a lesser degree Roscher describes also individual animals (dogs, horses etc.), plant species, classes of mythical beings (like the Cyclopes, Satyrs, Sirens), locations, events (i.e. the Trojan War and the Theban Wars), religious celebrations, concepts (like Heros, Verwandlungen, Viergöttersteine, Weltalter, Zwölfgötter), meteorological phaenomena (like winds), heavenly bodies and asterisms.
Defining individual entities within the cosmos of mythology can present a huge challeng, especially when it comes to homonyms, name variants and competing genealogies (see Smith 2020a, 2020b). This is especially true for less prominent figures by the same name. The most prominent example are probably the two Ajax, which already in Homer's time were split into Ajax the Great (Telamon's son) and Ajax the Lesser (Oileus's son), who are usually traced to competing local traditions which had to be split as the Iliad became a universal cultural staple of all Greek polities. Roscher defined no clear-cut rules for this sort of thing, as it is not a systematic work but an encyclopedia, a collection and assortment of material for research. It was up to the authors of the individual articles to either distinguish between different (numbered) characters or put them into a single article, differentiating only by letters. The inconsistencies in the numbering scheme of Roscher's headwords are a consequence of this.
-8And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg, as only a small fraction of myth is tangible to us through written texts, depictions and other ancient records. The unimaginably large and diverse mass of myth that existed in the billion minds of people in antiquity, which was shared and adapted orally as well as in other media, is lost to time forever.)
For simplicity's sake, the following broad categories of mythical entites have been assigned to the entries in Roscher's Lexicon:
- mythical entity: Q649388
- non-mythical entities:
Fingerprint
- Label
- Description
- Alias
Modelling items
FactGrid:Directory of Properties
Beings
- Part of: P8
- Hercules (Q498996): P8 : Roman mythology
- Genealogy
- Epithet: P784
- Conflict: P426 with qualifier P739
- Significant event: P119
Events
- Cause of event: P464